Shared exerience: creative writing students at the University of East Anglia.

In F Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Beautiful and Damned, the writer Dick Caramel tells of a conversation with his uncle from Kansas: "All the old man does is tell me he just met the most wonderful character for a novel. Then he tells me about some idiotic friend of his and then he says: 'There's a character for you! Why don't you write him up? Everybody'd be interested in him.' Or else he tells me about Japan or Paris, or some other very obvious place, and says: 'Why don't you write a story about that place? That'd be a wonderful setting for a story!'"

Anyone who has ever claimed to be a novelist will recognise this exchange. What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer? Or rather, what is it about writing that makes other people think they know how to do it? Dick Caramel's first novel, The Demon Lover, goes on to become a wild publishing success, and as a consequence, Caramel turns into an intolerably self-aggrandising bore. He talks constantly about money and his "career", sounding more like a businessman than an artist, then is demolished whenever he meets someone who hasn't heard of him and his book. Fitzgerald's portrait of "the writer" is as riddling a piece of characterisation as any he ever wrote, empathetic and damning and so ambivalent as to be cruel, almost, to himself.

Fitzgerald, like many writers of his time, went to Hollywood in search of a salaried profession: his friend Billy Wilder likened him to "a great sculptor hired to do a plumbing job". Commentators have expressed surprise at how hard working and conscientious he was as a studio employee, as though something other than hard work and conscientiousness had produced Tender is the Night and The Great Gatsby. But no amount of toil could disguise the fact that Fitzgerald was no screenwriter. "He didn't know how to connect the pipes so that the water could flow," Wilder added. It is a memorable image, and one that evokes the vulnerability of artistic self-esteem. Those writers who flocked to Hollywood to trade in their one bankable asset, writing, might have come away with the disquieting impression that they were no good at it either.

Today's novelist has what would seem to be a more humane alternative to being a (failed) hack. The ascent of creative writing courses has given writers a different kind of work to do, and is transforming every established role – writer, reader, editor, critic – in the literary drama. Dick Caramel's conversation with his uncle is no longer a stock scene: the writer has become a "professional" with a tenured academic status, a certified technician of language; one would ask him for advice, as one would a doctor, rather than tell him how to do his job. The terrain has become formalised, mapped out, institutionalised. People are paying to have their views about characterisation, setting, theme attended to: if you want a writer to listen to you, you'll have to sign up for an MA.

In one way it's high time writing was formalised: academic institutions offer a shelter for literary values, and for those who wish to practise them, in a way that publishing, being increasingly market-driven, does not. Painters and musicians have long been protected in a similar way – it is both an entitlement and a necessity for creative people to study and refine their craft. Yet creative writing courses are often seen as being somehow bogus, as even threatening those literary principles they set out to enshrine, though the truth is that the separation of literary from popular values in writing has been virtually impossible to bring about. This is a source of great dynamism in literary culture, for anyone can be a writer – at the very least, while the average person believes they could not compose a symphony, a significant minority want to write a novel. There is a demand, among people with little or no track record of writing, to study the art of fiction, and while this might not give creative writing much of an academic profile, it is absolutely reflective of the way the literary world works.

A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common – the desire to write – could almost be considered meaningless. Moreover, different creative writing tutors will respond to the work presented to them in unpredictable ways. One will like what another dislikes; contradictory advice can be given in two different classes about the same piece of work. So the question is, how can academic appraisal proceed on such terms?

The upper benchmark of academic assessment is that the work should be "of publishable standard", which implies (though doesn't actually state) a touching faith in publication as an assurance of quality. Students are asked to demonstrate a critical and theoretical understanding of their own processes; they are formally entitled to individual attention from tutors, by rota in workshops and by a stated number of contact hours outside workshops; their work is regularly marked, double-marked, and submitted to an external examiner as a failsafe mechanism; marks are lost for misuses of, among other things, grammar, punctuation and spelling; tutors are answerable for the marks they give before a board. Appraisal, in other words, is rather more rigorous than a lot of what happens at an editor's desk.

How are standards – publishable or otherwise – defined? The answer is: by agreement. There is no autocratic way of assessing literature: the shared basis of language forbids it. Agreement is the flawed, frightening, but ultimately trustworthy process by which writing is and always has been judged. When Virginia Woolf read Ulysses she dismissed it out of hand; then she talked about it to Katherine Mansfield and changed her mind. Creative writing teaching is predicated on something like that model.

Language is not only the medium through which existence is transacted, it constitutes our central experiences of social and moral content, of such concepts as freedom and truth, and, most importantly, of individuality and the self; it is also a system of lies, evasions, propaganda, misrepresentation and conformity. Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language; the student feels the need to assert a "true" self through the language system, perhaps for the reason that this same system, so intrinsic to every social and personal network, has given rise to a "false" self.

A piece of music or a work of art might echo to the sense of a "true" self, but it is often through language that an adult seeks self-activation, origination, for the reason that language is the medium, the brokering mechanism, of self. The notion of "finding your voice", simplistic as it may sound, is a therapeutic necessity, and for many people a matter of real urgency. It is also – or ought to be – a social goal. If the expansion of creative writing courses signifies anything, it isn't the cynicism of universities or the self-deception of would-be students: it means, simply, that our manner of life is dishonest, that it offers too few opportunities for self-expression, and that, for some people, there is too great a disjuncture between how things seem and how they actually feel.

A writer may be someone who has never lost their voice, or has always had it; for a number of reasons, they have withheld themselves from immersion in the social contract. Some creative writing students are already writers, but often they are people whose immersion, conversely, has been complete: they are writers who have never actually written anything. One thing it profits a writer to learn, through teaching, is how fundamental a distinction this is.

Many people come to study creative writing out of a need the writer has wholly internalised. The writer's authority, in a sense, rests on that fact. If the democratic basis of language is what underpins the idea of the "writers' workshop", then in that setting the writer is a free individual, enabling others to process varying degrees of confinement: confinement in artificial ideas about writing, sure enough, but confinement too in the subjectivity through which one very often learns to survive non-expressive experience. Such notions as "point of view" or "voice", while formalised and taught as narrative techniques, are in fact merely lessons in how to exteriorise sensibility, how to make the public persona more consistent with the private, how to put the subjective self to the test of objectivity.

A writer generally has to be alone in order to write: what is interesting about the writing workshop is its communality, suggestive as that is of deficiencies in the social milieux. Alienation produces loneliness, for which, as Marianne Moore said, solitude is the cure. The writing workshop posits a non-alienating social space, and as such creates the possibility of solitude as its sequel; the student who comes to the workshop lonely will leave it, one hopes, ready to be alone.

But to ask the question again: can these endeavours, admirable as they may be, constitute an academic process? What is actually "taught" in a creative writing class? That these questions are asked so frequently is testament to the mystique of the writing process and the degree to which that mystique is socially owned, an ownership that is part of the democratic ownership of language itself. We resist the idea that writing could be "technical": the narrative principle is too fused with our experience of living for us to perceive it as a system of rules. Indeed, we believe everyone has a book in them – a book, not a symphony, and not even a poem. What is it, this book everyone has in them? It is, perhaps, that haunting entity, the "true" self. The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn't want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free. In the novel that common currency, language, can be exchanged like for like. The novel seems to be the book of self: the problem is that, once you start to write it, you see that it has taken on certain familiar characteristics. It begins to seem not true but false, either a recreation of the false self or a failure to externalise the true one. It is a product, your product: in other words, more of the same. How, then, to produce the "true" writing? "Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows," writes Karl Ove Knausgaard in A Death in the Family. "That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?"

There is a spirituality, or at least a mysticism, to this statement that it seems to me ought to be embedded at the core of creative writing culture. The desire to be a published author is perhaps no more than a desire to be "there" permanently, all the time. What the student gets out of a writing workshop is a feeling of being "there" for a couple of hours, the beginning of a process by which "there" – writing – can become a more concrete aspect of identity. One way of getting "there" is by a system of rules that do, broadly speaking, govern narrative construction; increasingly, in my own teaching, I have come to believe that people already know these rules, but only in relation to their own experience.

The natural grasp of form, structure, style and dialogue can be witnessed everywhere in the way we conduct ourselves, and in the high levels of agreement that can be reached about the meaning of this conduct. The smallest child can tell the story of what he did that day, can work out how to make people laugh or how to make them anxious: by repeating his tale he can start to refine it based on the reactions he gets, learn to emphasise some parts and leave out others. The rules of writing are mostly indistinguishable from the rules of living, but this tends to be the last place people look when searching for "there". Yet the essence of what we know – all that we know – is what it is like to be ourselves.

"The past is hidden outside the realm," writes Proust in Swann's Way, "beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die." The reattachment of the subjective self to the material object is where much of the labour of writing lies – labour because, in this one sense, writing feels like the opposite of being alive. The intangible has to be reversed back into tangibility; every fibre of subjective perception has to be painstakingly returned to the objective fact from whence it came. The temptation is to elude this labour by "making things up", by escaping into faux-realities or unrealities that are the unmediated projections of the subjective self. This is not the same thing as imagination or inventiveness: the feeling of not believing something you are reading arises not from the fact that it is set in Hogwarts School but from the suspicion that it is pure projection. A writer who knows how to give subjective content an objective form can be as far-fetched as she likes. A writer who doesn't can make even the most creditable things unbelievable.

This labour, which is the labour to manufacture a feeling of reality, is what is taught, or at least analysed, in creative writing classes. Is it a science? Yes, to a degree. A well-written text is like a clock: its face shows an agreed representation of a bodiless element – in this case, time – but if you take its back off you find a mechanism that can be dismantled and readily understood. The writer-teacher can explain that mechanism: as in any field, there are people who do this well and people who do it less well. Do students believe that doing a creative writing degree will turn them into a famous author? Not in my experience. It is a course of study, like any other: it adds, rather than creates, value. It offers space, attention, refinement and respect to people in search of "there". More than that, it can offer a humane experience of creative self-exposure, one that the published writer – schooled in the hard knocks of critical reception, or the indifference of the lack of one – might envy.

What creative writing does for students is clear; what it does for writers is less so. Writers become teachers for a number of reasons, though need of money is usually one of them. A desire for social participation might be another, and sheer interest in the subject another. As jobs go, teaching is a good one; in fact, there are writers for whom the absence of a professional "profile" is a hardship in itself. Like Dick Caramel, they configure writing as a "career" full of obligations and appointments, in order to ward off the suspicion of amateurism and manage the insecurity of creative freedom. Respectability, for the creative writing teacher, is more easily procured; but the role of teacher, like that of parent, effectively ends what might be called creative unself-consciousness. The teacher/parent is under pressure to surrender, as the phrase goes, the inner child, to displace it into actual children, to become scheduled and reliable in order to leave the child irresponsible and free. For a writer, who may have fought every social compulsion to "grow up", whose inner world has been constellated around avoiding that surrender, this is an interesting predicament. Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority. So the writer is giving to others the service he might customarily have given himself. It might make him bigger or it might make him smaller, might betoken richness and maturity or depletion – might represent an increase in self, or might bring about its eventual loss.

How to get there: this is what the student comes to learn, and what the writer has to teach. In the face of such a statement, universities have to – and generally do – remain broadminded. Creative writing can be made more concrete, but not, truly, formalised, for it proceeds on a basis of negotiation and debate among individuals. It has no template: it is an evolving social form. For this reason, the proper home for it is indeed in an academic institution, which can shelter it as a strand of civilisation, an intellectual precept. All sorts of informal "academies" – among others the Faber academy, the Mumsnet academy, and the Guardian's own creative writing masterclasses – have naturally risen in the wake of academic creative writing culture, but it is up to universities to steer that culture, to define and refine it as it evolves.

At an international writers' seminar recently, the talk turned during a panel discussion to the subject of creative writing. A number of foreign novelists were expressing concern about the anglophone domination of creative writing provision, towards which overseas students were being inexorably drawn, even at the cost of having to express themselves in a language not their own. They wondered what the consequences of this trend would be for native literatures, and why their universities could not validate and run courses themselves. One of them, clearly infuriated by this discussion, suddenly delivered himself of a tirade.

Why, he wanted to know, were writers giving encouragement to this abysmal creative writing trend? Why were they perpetuating the fallacy that writing can be taught? Did they really want writing to become a kind of occupational therapy, a tragic pastime for old ladies and bored housewives – yes, he repeated, old ladies and housewives bored of staring out of their windows all day! By now the audience, composed largely of women, was in fits of laughter. Many of them had spent the day attending writing workshops organised around this public event. Yet the more he denounced them, the more they laughed: it was easy to put them – and us – to shame. Thinking about it afterwards, it seemed to me that this mocking discourse is increasingly becoming obsolete. In a way, it is a form of cultural self-hatred. It was that writer's own insecurity that required him to distinguish himself from old ladies and housewives, to be the "real" writer, the centre of attention. He had forgotten to honour the principle of freedom that had permitted him to become who he was. If creating writing culture represents only that – freedom – it is justification enough.